Wednesday, February 04, 2009

The Arabs Took Our Language

Did I ever tell you that I love my new Arabic teacher? Well not lah so new. I have been with her since last October. When she first came to our class, she seemed sooo garang. Her voice was loud and coarse and she seemed tough. But I guess that is the personality of a Palestinian woman. Very strong. When she speaks, she speaks really fast and you can hear her miles away. But she is hilarious! And the best part is, she doesn't even know she is funny. And she loves to wink when she makes jokes, which makes me laugh even more.

Anyway, since most of my readers (I think) are Malays or at least people who understand the Malay Language, you can probably relate to me when I said that some of our vocabularies are similar to the arabic vocab. You know like ilmu, fitnah, tamak, salji and many more.

So it is not surprising that when my teacher introduces new words, I would say, hey, we use the same word too. And it's not just us the Malays, the urdu language use alot of arabic words too. (In my class there are Malaysians, Indonesians, Hindi, Pakistani, Phillipines and Barbados. SO we have samples only from these countries)

Tired of keep pointing out that we use the same word too, she said, "Yeah! Yeah! I know. We borrow it from you." Hahahhahahhaha!

From then on, each time there is a new similar word, I would say, "Why you arabs are taking so many of our language?" She would laugh so hard and ruffle my errr hijab. By the way she loves to ruffle my head (should be hair, but since I have the hijab on..) She would reply and said, "We are borrowing language from all over the world, the Malay, Urdu and God knows what.". And the way she said it, with her booming coarse voice and her laughing face, made it so hilarious sampai meleleh air mata aku.

It's funny because we all know that it's not true. The arabic vocabularies are so rich and so clever and twisting.

Ana uhibbu mmudarisati fi Lillah.

Ana - Iuhibbu - I love (can omit the word ana if you use uhibuu)mudarisati - my (female) teacherfi Lillah - for the sake of Allah.

anon - salam. both of the places you mention tu memang ada ajar bahasa arab. for beginners i suggest you go to either fanar or the place i go to which is maryam centre. if you are an advanced student to to qatar guest centre or qatar uni. however for the guys, qatar guest centre punya arab course is at night.